BE A SNOB, it could add years to your life, claims a study of civil servants.

Previous surveys of Whitehall pen-pushers have indicated that the lower down the organisational and social hierarchy a civil servant sits, the greater their chance of suffering a heart attack or stroke because being low in the pecking order is so stressful.

But a new study of 5,500 staff members over four years indicates that you can kid yourself into having a longer life simply by overestimating your social status and achievements.

Psychologists at University College London asked civil servants to rank their own opinion of their status on a social ladder. They rated themselves on the basis of objective items, such as job level and income, and subjective matters such as their father’s social class, how well-educated they were and how well-off they felt.

Objective rank and income had no effect on the civil servants’ future health. It was the subjective stuff that mattered: how clever and connected they felt they were, even if this did not accurately reflect reality.

Is this just Whitehall’s wannabe mandarins being their snobby worst? No, says the Psychosomatic Medicine study: when people were set the same questions in Thailand and Mexico, the results were the same.

Hard sell: erection gel’s slick promise

GELLING with your partner might never be the same again, if a British company’s final round of trials of an over-the-counter alternative to Viagra works out positively.

The company, Futura Medical, announced this week that it is on track to produce the world’s first rub-on erection gel. It contains a chemical, glyceryl trinitrate (GTN), which penetrates penile tissues to stimulate blood flow.

In its first clinical trials, 15 volunteers at King’s College Hospital, London, applied the gel four times and submitted their privates to ultrasound testing. The results showed that in seven cases out of ten bloodflow was boosted sufficiently to produce erections. The stimulant properties of GTN are already known: the breakthrough is in producing a gel that may deliver it safely and efficiently.

The makers plan to sell the gel in chemists, and it could even be supplied as a lubricant in condoms. Futura has already signed a deal with the makers of Durex to produce such a product.

There’s only one problem: it seems that one dose in ten of the gel gives its recipient a headache, which was more likely the more gel a man rubbed on to himself. “Not tonight dear, I’ve got an erection,” could become a new male excuse.

Clocking cancer

A HORMONE that helps to set our body clocks could provide a key to curing many cancers, claim scientists who studied the results of ten previous trials involving more than 600 patients.

Melatonin is best known for regulating our sleep cycles. People with chronic insomnia are sometimes offered melatonin pills. Now Canadian researchers say their analysis of previous European studies shows that high doses of the hormone can reduce the risk of death in some cancer patients by more than a third.

Melatonin appears to be effective with a range of solid tumours, including cancers of the lung, brain, skin, breast and kidney. High doses of 10g to 40g not only appear to be predominantly safe but can also help patients’ sleep patterns, say the scientists from Toronto University and McMaster University, in the Journal of Pineal Research.

Melatonin’s association with cancer has been shown in studies assessing the links between shift work and cancer rates. It is thought the hormone may also affect the speed at which cancers grow.

The instinct diet

WE’VE had Atkins, food combining, F-Plan and a whole alphabet soup of diet plans: but could the answer merely mean following your instincts? Steven Hawks, a health science professor at Brigham Young University, claims that the best way to cut weight is “intuitive eating”. He says his small study shows that people achieve lasting results if they ignore the temptations that surround them, and eat when hungry and stop when sated.

Easily said, but how do you achieve that? Hawks says you have to retrain your mind to accept your body shape, so long as it is fairly healthy, and to consider faddy dieting as dangerous. This might simply work by deterring people from yo-yo diets.

Hawks claims that he lost 50lb (22.6kg) by trusting his body’s instincts. Brace yourself for the book.

Dickens of a cure

IT’S NOT too late for Tiny Tim: Christmas nears and medical minds have turned to finding a diagnosis for the Christmas Carol character. Daniel Glunk (a fine Dickensian name), of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, says that Tim may have had tubular acidosis, a kidney disease that makes blood too acidic. It was either that or rickets from bad food and lack of sun. Whatever the cause, says Glunk, we should copy Dickens’s cure: kindness and generosity.

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